Husband and wife owner builders building a coastal dream

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Hamptons house

This is a bit of a slack post seeing as there is only one photo but I have been meaning to post it since we put the mulch down.
I will post more internal photos over the next week or so as we have finally finished off a lot if rooms. Still so much to do though..

Like this:

It has been fairly manic of late at the house with trades everywhere inside.

We have had tiling happening and also cabinetry going in. The cabinets were full on, the cabinet maker was there from 7am till well after dark trying to get the majority of the cabinets in in one day which was a huge task so the photos that are below of that preliminary install, there is a lot left still be done, with the stone bench tops being templated today. The shade of white we chose for the kitchen is Dulux vivid white.

preliminary kitchen cabinets shaker profile

kitchen cabinets shaker profile

Ensuite cabinet

Laundry cabinets

Laundry cabinets corner view

The tilers have been great and haven’t complained once about the amount of brick bond patterns I wanted on the walls of the bathrooms. The have done a brilliant job so far but there is still a fair bit to doing in the way of splashbacks but now we have to wait on the stone which will be a couple of weeks.

Guest ensuite cabinet in Dulux flooded gum half strength

ensuite shower tiling subway tiles on wall

upstairs bathroom tiling progress

The staircase is being started tomorrow, we have opted for a white timber one with just plain square profiles, we hope it will look similar to the one below. The carpenter specializes in restoration work so we are confident it will look brilliant.

The garage doors were installed and I must admit I had a moment of thinking that they were too beige (being surfmist) but that is the closest to white available. I think what highlights it more is the fact that we are edging the doors in Dulux white on white so it tends to highlight the difference, but I’m hoping that once its all properly painted it will blend in better.

garage doors in surfmist

scaffolding removed in great room

view through to dining room ( with lots of tiles in the way)

I wish I could say it’s all smooth sailing at the moment but it’s actually the opposite, at this point in time every delay has a major impact on other trades that follow and there have been a few tense moments (that’s an understatement) on site when different trades are getting under each others feet. I tried to think back to the last couple of times we built with a project builder to see if it was any less stressful getting a someone else build but it wasn’t. There is still compromise after compromise at this stage because the reality is not everything works how it should and you have to just suck it up.

Floorboards are starting next week, we are having roasted peat which has a lot of dark chocolate tones (see pic below) so I will post some more interesting pictures once it goes down and bench tops go on 🙂

It is now part way through June and we are hoping for a September move in date. Things have been powering on and we have had that many people on site its hard to find a parking spot most days.

We have had a team of plasterers for the last week putting up gyprock and starting on the cornicing upstairs. We had some quotes on rendering and white skim coating the interior but surprisingly it was cheaper to gyprock and tape the entire interior rather than plaster, this also worked out better in the two storey height great room as we could use really large sheets of gyprock across the upper slab which would do away with putting a stringer around the join to disguise cracking around the slab line that usually occurs in plastered interiors.

The cornice we chose was CSR Concerto, we had a moment this morning of google-ing pictures of it to double check which way it was to be installed as this one can be used either way, in the end we chose based on what looked better holding it to the ceiling and we are happy with it.

We have had our cabinets check measured on site, I’ve lost sleep over the design of the kitchen so I hope it looks as good in reality as what I envision it to look like. At this stage the cabinetry will be ready by the end of July.

Josh from Talbot Le Page Design continues to be our go to man for trades, his help has been invaluable on this build and I doubt we would have kept things moving so fast without his help.

The R9WA guys are still going hard finishing off the windows, which thanks to the millions of cross bars that need to be applied are proving a time consuming job, these Hampton style windows are a lot of work but look brilliant, the guys are doing a brilliant job.

The build is changing daily so I will post more photos of the progress soon.

We have finally decided on our external colour scheme for the house.
This was not an easy task and one that we were still debating right up until the night before the roof colorbond had to be ordered.

For ages now the house has been (and still is) littered with paint swatches and computer print outs of houses in various colour schemes stuck on the fridge. We finally decided to go with a dark colorbond roof in monument in a trim deck profile as opposed to the usual corrugated profile.

trim deck profile

colorbond monument

American colorbond profile

That sorted we knew we still wanted white gutters, window surrounds and garage doors. You would think that white would be pretty simple colour to find in gutters and garage doors, WRONG, unfortunately the closest colour to white that colorbond makes is Surfmist which is not white but a very light beige colour. Admittedly it does look white in the sunlight but you would think that with the squillions of dollars a year that colourbond makes they could produce a basic white. The reason for them not doing this is not clear to me, maybe all whites discolour over time, I’m not sure, but again I refer to the squillions they make and wonder why they cant come up with a UV stabilized white. So we had to go with surfmist for the guttering and hopefully the slight difference wont be noticeable. Anyway rant over about surfmist.

The second dilemma was the weatherboard colour, after many failed attempts to convince my husband that there is a colour referred to as ‘greige’ which is a warm toned grey we finally decided on Dulux Flooded Gum at 50% strength which we think will look brilliant with the dark roof and white trim around the windows (we hope) below are a couple of pics of schemes that we like.

I guess I should start this blog off by saying that my husband and I have built a few times before now but always through project builders in the past.
We are now embarking on our first owner builder project as we thought we have done it a few times previously and are not complete rookies to the building process, only time will tell if this will be of an advantage or not.

Living in Western Australia the preferred building product here is double brick, and having built two storey houses in the past we have had an average build time of 12-18 months. This time around we did some investigating alternatives and we came across a W.A. developed insulated panel called R9 greenwall which has a fibre cement outer skin and a high density urethane foam core that provides a high level of insulation ( the details of the product can be found by clicking the R9 link to the right of the blog) and the ability of the panels to be cut to size and detailed prior to them coming to site allow for a quick build time.

The style of house we had been thinking about for a while is based around an American coastal style, weatherboard character house. I’m loath to say Hampton’s style because that term is over used a lot at the moment, but below are a few pics of the style we are going for.